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Music Features

Renaissance Man

David Talbot
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Renaissance Man

MUSIC/STAGE/LIT When I meet Ise Lyfe in downtown Oakland, the 28-year-old MC is sporting a button-down shirt, slacks, cardigan, and a purple and pink tie. Put a Wall Street Journal under his arm and he might blend in with the lunchtime business crowd. He’s fresh from a meeting with one of the distributors of his company, Lyfe Productives, hence rocking business casual.

Seeing Ise “in character” is appropriate, given his latest endeavor: a theatrical show, Pistols & Prayers, and the book of the same title (available on iUniverse) on which it’s based. After a successful one-off performance at Berkeley Rep — and a tour involving the show, book signings, and rap gigs — Pistols returns for a three-night run at Oakland’s Fox Black Box Theater benefiting nonprofit Youth Movement Records. According to Ise, his pitches of the book to African American studies departments have resulted in 21 course adoptions.

“You have good books in universities, like Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, but not contemporary texts from a hip-hop artist,” he says . “My book’s a collection of prayers, poems, journal entries, essays, anecdotes. But it’s also palatable for hip-hop heads. You can sit down and blaze through it.”

As Ise suggests, Pistols is an eclectic affair. Its unity comes from the author’s political sensibility. The poems recall the late-1960s explosion of African American poetry documented in anthologies like 1972’s New Black Voices, even as Ise updates the frame of reference. Most compelling are the nonfiction prose meditations, recounting, for example, his visit to Ghana, the murder of Oscar Grant, and his ambivalence about Barack Obama.

Such material might easily prove resistant to dramatic presentation, but Ise is no stranger to the stage; he has performed spoken word since age 17 and rocked HBO’s Def Poetry Jam in 2006. While loosely following the book, the stage version of Pistols is a genuine theatrical experience. Using a minimalist set, spotlights, and a video screen, Ise brings Pistols to life with support from DC of KMEL, folksinger Melanie Demore (who punctuates the proceedings with African pounding sticks) and celloist Michael Fecskes.

“It’s a collage,” Ise says. “We bring together hip-hop, folklore, spirituals, and [Fecskes] playing the cello brings in this Americanized background. You’re able to see the clash of it onstage.”

At many rap-related theatre shows, the cast members are actors who fail miserably at hip-hop. But Ise is a real rapper. When comparing the state of contemporary hip-hop with its golden age, he can rip a verse from KRS-One’s “Ah Yeah” with all the furious swagger of the original before dropping into a comically tepid rendition of Drake’s “Best I Ever Had.” He also has acting chops. Seeing Ise transform into one of his characters, a dope fiend named Uncle Randy based on addicts he knew as a kid in Oakland’s Brookfield neighborhood, is impressive: his eyes go glassy, his face and body contort with tics and twitches as Randy delivers his satirical, cracked-out observations on America.

Artistic ambitions aside, Ise has turned to theatre and books as a way of getting more exposure in the overcrowded, blinged-out rap landscape. Make no mistake: Ise Lyfe gets around. He tours nationally, is a commissioner of arts and cultural Affairs in Oakland, and counts among his fanbase luminaries like Alice Walker and Dave Chappelle. He has two nationally-distributed albums under his belt, spreadtheWord (Hard Knock, 2006) and The Prince Cometh (7even89ine, 2008), which has moved more than 30,000 units. Still, he admits, “We have a hard time getting the same coverage as my counterparts.”

“Normally I’d be recording my next record,” he says when asked about the two years since Prince Cometh. “But I want to put that money and energy into expanding our audience then dropping a record that changes everything.”

“There’s no one here who sells more records, fills more shows, or does anything more provocative than us,” he says. “I keep hearing, ‘Nobody’s trying to hear that shit you’re talking about.’ But the numbers say somebody is. It’s interesting that Ise Lyfe is an afterthought when I run this shit. And I mean that humbly.” 

PISTOLS & PRAYERS

Fri/21–Sat/22, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/23, 4 p.m.; $10–$20

530 19th St., Oakl.

(510) 832-4212 www.iselyfe.com

Mission possibility

David Talbot
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1
Mission possibility

Meklit Hadero’s voice exudes music. A casual conversation over morning coffee can feel like an impromptu personal performance by the San Francisco jazz musician, because even her speaking voice has rhythm.

Assured with the spoken word, Hadero pauses at all the right times, naturally crafting an underlying melodic or poetic content to her dialogue. The intonation floats up and down like a line from one of her songs, as the buzz of the bean grinder, the clanking ceramic cups, and pings of a cash register replace traditional percussion. Opening and closing her eyes between thoughts, she carefully constructs each sentence.

“There is an art to not saying things too quickly,” she blushes when I call her out on this distinct way of speaking. “You have to be open to letting the words come. If there’s too much conversation in your head, the poetry runs away.”

Hadero is all about feeling out the right tempo. And whether it’s in regard to speech or daily duties, she’s established a beat. But as her musical career has grown in the past couple years due to residencies at both the Red Poppy Art House and the de Young Museum, her to-do list has simultaneously matured into a demanding beast, distracting her creative process and throwing off her internal metronome. When she does get a day off, it’s all about coffee and taking time to breathe.

 

“I’ll sleep in, enjoy the view from my apartment, and trick myself into not using my computer — I hide it in my car. Well, just kidding … but maybe I should do that.”

It’s on these days that Hadero is able to create music. Soul-filled vocals dance with jazzy, playful bass for a sound that references Nina Simone and suggests a more vibrant Norah Jones. This week she releases her debut album, On A Day Like This … (Porto Franco), a collection of plush, bright songs woven from the world of influences Hadero’s been collecting throughout her 30 years of life.

Hadero was born in Ethiopia, spent her childhood in Brooklyn, and has since lived in a dozen other places, including Germany; Washington, D.C.; Iowa City; Seattle; Miami; and New Haven, Conn., where she earned a degree from Yale. While she’s most comfortable in “nomad mode,” if there’s anywhere that’s home for her in this country, it’s here, Hadero says.

“The artistic community here is not something to take for granted. I’m coming on six years here in San Francisco — that’s the longest I’ve spent anywhere,” she pauses to reflect on this realization. “I will always be a person with multiple homes — because for me, home isn’t a physical place.”

For Hadero, home is made up of the people who inhabit a space and the rich exchanges that happen among them. It’s the diversity. The mountains. The water. The coffee shops and the music. On A Day Like This … is her ode to California.

“All the songs were written in San Francisco — they’re a culmination of my first period here. My Mission community of artists are all on this album, all the people I’ve been working and playing with for years. These are my moments in the Mission.”

MEKLIT HADERO CD RELEASE PARTY

With DJ Jeremiah Kpoh, and art by Great Tortilla Conspiracy

Thurs/13, 8 p.m., $15–$18

Bimbo’s 365 Club

365 Columbus, SF

1 (877) 4FL-YTIX

www.meklithadero.com

 

The sound of the city

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
The sound of the city

STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO Do you have a favorite musician who plays outside in San Francisco? I’d name many, if I knew their names. There’s the kid no older than 10 who led a two-piece rock band (himself on voice-guitar) through a great show to a growing crowd at Dolores Park, then played soccer immediately after. There’s the guy at 24th Street BART who sounds like Johnny Cash. There’s the man with the white guitar by San Francisco Center, and the guy who used to sing opera by Macy’s. It’s all too easy to miss the sound of life when your ears are plugged by little headphones. With that in mind, and with Heddy Honigmann’s great 1998 documentary The Underground Orchestra as one inspiration, it seemed right to talk to some of the people who make music for those who listen. Thanks to Elise-Marie Brown, Nicole Gluckstern, D. Scot Miller and Amber Schadewald for their contributions to this piece. (Johnny Ray Huston)


Name: Antone Lee

What styles of music do you play? I play a mix of folk and modern country on my guitar. Most of my music is original.

Where are your favorite places to play? I usually like to play down here (Civic Center BART station) because of the great sound and acoustics in the hallway.

How long have you been gigging on the streets or underground? I’ve been playing on the streets since I quit my job 3 years ago. This is what I do for a living. It’s pure joy.

What do you like about it and why do you do it? I like vibing off of people as they come and go. It’s nice to play whatever I’m feeling at the moment.

What don’t you like about it? Sometimes the people walking by can be sort of distracting. I usually just close my eyes and sink into the song.

Do you have recordings or a Web site? I have a MySpace (www.myspace.com/antoneleemusic) where some of my songs are, but I have about thirty songs that I’m waiting to record.

What street musicians and other musicians do you admire? I really like Fiddle Dave. He’s got a great original bluegrass sound. I also like Federico who plays more gypsy-styled café music.(Elise-Marie Brown)

Name: Ilya Kreymer

What styles of music do you play? I play eastern European music. A lot of Klezmer, Russian and Balkan music.

Where are your favorite sites to play? My favorite places to busk are the BART stations in the Mission, and also farmers’ markets. I usually like to busk two or three times a week.

How long have you been playing on the streets or underground? For five months.

What do you like about it, and why do you do it? I like the fact that it gives me a chance to practice and I get to see how people react to the music. The acoustics in the 16th and 24th BART stations are especially good. It’s also a good way to meet other musicians.

What don’t you like about it? Obviously there’s a lot of outside noise. You never know when you might be interrupted. Sometimes I might be doing really well and no one will be there to listen, but when I mess up more people might be around.

Do you have recordings or a Web site? I’ve actually got some recordings on reverbnation (www.reverbnation.com). But I’m hoping to update it soon with more songs. I’m also working on having a band that plays Russian music, too.

What street musicians or other musicians do you admire? There’s an accordion player that plays down at Civic Center. I think during morning rush hour. He also does magic tricks and wears outfits that match his accordion. He’s a longtime busker who I really admire.

What’s been your best experience playing? I had a really good experience at the Alemany market recently. A friend of mine was working at the farmers’ market. I was busking next to her booth while she danced. People were stopping by and taking notice, so that was really nice. (Brown)

 

Names: The Haight Street Vagabonds: Peter, Bucky, Crisp and Jack

Where do you play? Fisherman’s Wharf, on the sidewalk next to Cold Stone Creamery.

What styles of music do you play? Gypsy music, folk, Russian Folk. We jam. That’s like asking what kind of music the Grateful Dead play.

What are your usual instruments? Broken mandolin, harmonica, pots and pans, guitar, hand drums, children’s toys, hands, feet.

Why do you play? For fun, to entertain, and to keep our spirits up. I don’t want the money — then I feel like I’m whoring myself out to capitalism. I want food, beer, weed, cigarettes, and the best thing — instruments!

When do you play? Everyday. Sometimes the members change. Sometimes people walking by will join for a few minutes, hours or days.

How many years have you been playing on the street? Crisp has been playing for a year, Bucky since he left home four years ago at age 14.

What’s your philosophy about music? The best music has never been recorded. The best music is played for family and friends, at night, around a campfire. Or when you’re alone. (Amber Schadewald)

Name: Benjamin Barnes

What styles of music do you play? I play guitar and viola, but violin projects better and I know a lot of repertory. I’ve got maybe 3 hours of Bach memorized. It’s a meditative thing. There are six sonatas and six cello suites, and I play the cello suites on viola and violin. They’re nice profound pieces and sometimes people will stop and listen. I was playing Bach’s Chaconne and this guy stopped and listened to the whole piece and tipped me afterward.

Where are your favorite places to play? The Mission BART stations. The acoustics aren’t bad — you get a little reverb like you would in a hall. The first place I played was Powell Street station. It was 1989. I put my can down and basically practiced and made 15 dollars. I packed it all up and went home and threw the money on my bed and laughed. I was working at a coffee shop and putting myself through school.

I had a string quartet (the Rilke String Quartet) and we used to play at Montgomery and Embarcadero. We called it guerrilla musicianship.

What do you like about it, and why do you do it? It’s fulfilling to play these great pieces. I’ve been working on memorizing all these pieces and finding new ways to interpret them.

I was just in NY and saw people busking in Central Park and Greenwich Village. There’s a famous violinist, Joshua Bell, who played in the NY subway for a couple hours, and no one recognized him or that he was playing on a Stradivarius. Most people walked by or gave him a dollar, and one kid played air violin. He made 26 dollars.

Do you have recordings or a Web site? I have a lot of songs and string quartet and solo viola stuff that I’ve written and played on my website (www.benjaminbarnes.com). You can download it for free. There’s a spot where you can make a donation. I’ve gotten about 26 dollars. (Laughs)

I’m playing a free show at Caffeinated Comics on May 16th. We’re going to play an acoustic show, with songs I wrote and Bowie covers, Beatles covers, Led Zep and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” (Huston)

Name: Anthony

Where are your favorite places to play? Montgomery Bart Station, sometimes Fisherman’s Wharf.

What styles of music do you play? Love songs.

What are your favorite songs? “All The Woman I Need” by Luther Vandross, and anything Barry White.

How many years have you been playing on the street? 10.

What are your necessary accessories? Sparkly blue nail polish, mini Bible, Newports.

How long do you play? I stay until my dick gets hard and then probably longer.

Why do you do it? To entertain people and make some money. I don’t play for my health. (Schadewald)

Name: Brass Liberation Orchestra

When was the BLO founded? 2002-ish

How many members are there? Probably about 20 at the moment. 50 or more for the life of the band.

Where are your favorite spots to play? How do you get the word out? We play for change: picket lines, street marches, demonstrations. Wherever people want to dance in the street. We mostly play at events that other people are publicizing, (but) when we do our own shows, we use email and word of mouth.

What’s been your most memorable performance? Depends on who you ask! Demos at the start of the Iraq War where the band was arrested en masse? Oakland Oscar Grant marches? Whole Foods “Hey Mackey” pro-healthcare protest?

Are there other street bands you admire? There are many street bands whose music we admire. Some bands with similar political orientation include Rude Mechanical Orchestra (NYC), Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble (Montreal), Cackalack Thunder (Greensboro, NC). We also respect the youth work of Loco Bloco in the Mission, who are currently facing a budget crisis and could use some fundraising support.

What’s your favorite song to play together? A lot of us love New Orleans Second Line, and also Balkan brass music. One song we play at almost every gig is “Roma Rama,” a simplified Balkan-style tune written for us by Axel Hererra. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Name: Federico Petrozzino

What styles of music do you play? I play mostly folk and Beatles covers.

Where are your favorite places to play? I’ve played at Mills College and Ireland’s 32. But I make my living as a street musician playing around here (Powell BART station).

How long have you been playing on the streets or underground? I’ve been out here for about 3 months since I got in to town from Argentina.

What do you like about it, and why do you do it? It’s nice when you feeling like you’re doing good and people will walk by and smile or give you a wink.

What don’t you like about it? To be honest, I love the bums. But sometimes they can be crazy, which can turn some people away. It’s a distraction, but we try to be respectful.

Do you have recordings or a Web site? I have some of my stuff at purevolume (www.purevolume.com/fefon). The next step is to play at more places in the area.

What street musicians and other musicians do you admire? Frank Lynn. He’s been down here for over 30 years and is kind of a father to all of us street musicians. He’s an amazing musician and only plays on two strings. He has such a deep voice and everyone respects him.

What’s been your best experience playing? Just watching parents teach their children to appreciate music and give money. It’s great to see them learn how to be humble and respectful of the arts. (Brown)

 

Name: Larry “Bucketman” Hunt

How long have you been playing music? I’ve playing drums for 49 years. My first kit was a set of buckets when I was three years old.

I’m not from here. I’m from Kansas and I’ve had the chance to play with some of the greats all across the United States — Jimmy Smith, Pearl Bailey, The Drifters. I played with John Lee Hooker when he opened up the Boom Boom Room. This is what I do.

Where are your favorite places to play? 4th and Market, Powell and Geary (with New Funk Generation).

What don’t you like about playing music on the streets or underground? Old Navy, the Flood Building, their security is chasing me off now. I’ve been out here for fourteen years, was in Pursuit Of Happyness with Will Smith, and now they’re trying to get rid of me. They call the cops. The cops don’t want to do it, but they have to. (D. Scot Miller)

 

Beauty lies

David Talbot
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0
Beauty lies

MUSIC Let’s get this out of the way: Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson writes beautiful music. His string sections shiver and swell, his melodies alternately soar and ache, and the electronic textures that he often weaves in amid the more traditional orchestral instruments are unobtrusively massaged into the mix. This is music that doesn’t take warming up to, but rather cocoons you with its immediate approachability and occasional familial resemblances to members of the classical canon as well as more modern film composers such as Nino Rota and Elmer Bernstein. (In fact, many of Jóhannsson’s albums started as original soundtracks, or have been used as such.)

“Prettiness is not something I strive for, even though I know that most people’s initial reaction to my work is to say that it’s beautiful,” Jóhannsson counters bluntly over the phone when I ask for his feelings on the subject. “I don’t think beauty is the main goal. I think it’s more a certain emotional quality. I work in a very visceral way and I try to make music that affects you viscerally and that affects you physically.”

This has certainly been my experience of Jóhannsson’s music, starting with Englaborn, his 2002 debut on the Touch label, and up through his most recent release, last year’s And In the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees (Type), in spite of — or perhaps because of — its beauty. Listening to these classical-not-classical albums, it is hard not to feel that familiar tug inside — the affective prelude to either laughing or crying — that often occurs when one encounters something beautiful.

Composer Benjamin Britten once wrote that “It’s cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.” Britten then cataloged the different types of cruel beauty music allows the listener to access: there is “the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom,” “the beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love,” and “the cruel beauty of nature and the everlasting beauty of monotony.”

The kinds of beauty described by Britten — beauty attenuated by pain or loss — are present in Jóhannsson’s music, enriched by the context of its conception. Englaborn’s icy and delicate arrangements were conceived as a compliment to the violence and emotional ugliness of the play it originally scored. Fordlandia (4AD), Jóhannsson’s monumental 2008 album, was inspired in part by Henry Ford’s abandoned prefabricated industrial town built in the Amazonian rainforest in 1928, itself a monument to failure. And In the Endless Pause … is an expanded soundtrack to Marc Craste’s animated eco-parable Varmints, a critique of the environmental costs of unchecked urbanization told with a cast of rodents. When asked who his ultimate fantasy collaborator would be, Jóhannsson immediately names the late, great depressive Belgian chanson specialist Jacques Brel.

Despite the unabashed emotionality of his music, with its darker spells of sturm und drang , Jóhannsson discusses his work matter-of-factly. “I think what I’m interested in is the clash of culture and nature, or of technology and nature,” he says. “I don’t write ‘absolute music.’ It always starts with a nonmusical idea.” Better to leave the gushing to the critics, I suppose — a charge that could certainly be leveled at this particular profile. But I know I won’t be the only one reaching for a handkerchief when Jóhannsson and his six-piece ensemble take to the Great American Music Hall’s stage. Yes, it is cruel that music can be so beautiful. But hearing it is nonetheless sublime.

JÓHAN JÓHANNSSON

With Christopher Willits

Fri/14, 9 p.m. (doors at 8 p.m.), $21

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

1(888) 233-0449

www.gamh.com

 

A roar from underground

David Talbot
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0
A roar from underground

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC When asked if it’s a good time in history to be in a sludgy, uncompromising heavy metal band, High on Fire’s Matt Pike stifles a chuckle: “It is for me, man!” Reached by phone in Los Angeles as he prepares for a show at the El Rey Theatre, Pike is far from loquacious, but clearly enjoying the arrival of hard-earned, well-deserved success. His band, a thunderous, heavily-distorted power trio, bastard son of St. Vitus and Slayer, just signed on for a string of European dates opening for Metallica.

Before they set off across the Atlantic, High on Fire will appear at Oakland’s Fox Theater to play a concert called the Missing Link, a weighty omnibus of a heavy metal bill that brings together two potent touring packages, their itineraries cleverly fused into one mammoth night of music. Pike’s band is joined by tour-mates Priestess, Bison B.C., and Black Cobra. Headliners Mastodon deploys its own retinue of support: Between the Buried and Me, Baroness, and Valient Thorr.

The bands at the top of the bill are living proof of this epoch’s friendly attitude toward challenging, underground heavy metal. Mastodon charted at No. 11 with 2009’s Crack the Skye (Warner Bros.) and Between the Buried and Me hit No. 36 with The Great Misdirect (Victory). Oakland native sons High on Fire stormed into the limelight in February 2010; Snakes for the Divine (E1 Music) debuted at No. 62. Baroness’ Blue Record (Relapse) was the critical darling of 2009 — Decibel magazine named it album of the year — and it peaked at No. 117.

Those still working their way up from the bottom are no less optimistic. Speaking on the phone while peregrinating around L.A., Jason Landrian, singer/guitarist for crushing S.F. duo Black Cobra, is loving life. “I think it’s a great time to be in a heavy band. There are a lot more people paying attention and taking the music a lot more seriously.” Black Cobra, which was recently signed by legendary label Southern Lord Records, has ample experience with and appreciation for the bands it will share the stage with at the Fox. “For us,” Landrian says, “it’s a thrill to be involved with what seems like a cross-section of what’s going on right now in the underground scene.”

Superficially, the bands on the bill are easy to circumscribe within geographical boxes. Mastodon and Baroness both hail from Georgia, a state that is quickly becoming one of the nation’s most fertile breeding grounds for independent metal. Between the Buried and Me and Valient Thorr are also from Dixie, storming out of North Carolina university towns Greensboro and Chapel Hill, respectively. Priestess was founded in Montreal, and Bison B.C. in Vancouver (in the eyes of American rock critics, everything Canadian seems related). Black Cobra and High on Fire represent the Bay Area.

Yet this sort of convenient compartmentalization is redolent of a scene-based musical analysis that is rapidly becoming obsolete. A generation that came of age during the sodden triumph of the “Seattle sound” has matured into an army of bands that defy physical space. The insidious tentacles of social networking and the exponentially expanding capacity of cheap bandwidth have enabled independent musicians to bridge vast distances, to identify kindred spirits and isolated fans. Early Black Cobra material was written while the band’s two members resided on different coasts, swapped back and forth methodically with the click of a mouse. The Internet has been a boon to concert bookers and promoters as well, allowing them to ferret out undeserved markets and spread the digitized word.

Looking back through lists of past tour dates, the connections and inter-pollinations among this underground army of heavily distorted road warriors are practically infinite. It seems as if every band has toured with every other band on the Missing Link roster at least once. “We’ve known those guys forever,” Pike says when asked about Mastodon, and it’s only partly hyperbole — the members of Mastodon met at an Atlanta High on Fire show in 1999.

Though today’s metal vanguard takes advantage of technological innovations, it’s the relentless touring that reaps rewards. And while life on the road has its costs, the new century’s burgeoning crop of itinerant headbangers can depend on a tight-knit nomadic community — bearded and unwashed — that grows stronger by the day. “It’ll be a reunion with friends, which is a cool thing,” says Landrian. “You end up meeting all these people, touring around, and when you get a show like Missing Link happening, everybody knows each other.”

Armed with vans, smart phones, and arsenals of crushing riffs, the bands of Missing Link have the entire continent at their disposal. It’s a far cry from the specter of the 1980s, poisoned by feuding thrash titans and the internecine, hair-sprayed fist-fight for scraps from the Sunset Strip table. “That’s the thing about this underground metal scene,” Landrian says beatifically. “Everyone’s working together. There’s not a lot of ‘Oh, we’re competing with these bands to be in a position of honor.’ There’s a lot of camaraderie. Everybody sees each other in the same light.”

THE MISSING LINK

Mastodon, Between the Buried and Me, High on Fire

with Baroness, Priestess, Valient Thorr, Black Cobra, Bison BC

Sat/8, 4 p.m., $35

The Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 302-2277

www.thefoxoakland.com

 

Pump you up!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Pump you up!

kimberly@sfbg.com

MUSIC Follow the heavily pitch-shifted, layered vocals woozily intoning “I love drugs” on “Mind Eraser” from Growing’s new Pumps (Vice). You’ll end up deep in the thicket of the group’s hallucinatory haze, levitating on a cockeyed cloud of bird calls, darting beats, and cries of “It’s my brain!” Welcome to the Brooklyn band’s bristly, growling hoedown, one emulating the sound of the hive mind in a crowded nightclub and pulsing with swooping, strobe-light electronics — though those familiar, whooping party horns refuse to cooperate with any potential dance trance, rarely continuing longer than a few bars.

It’s the sound of a band evolving into some creature poised between an art group that inspires its audience to sit on the floor, cross-legged and spaced-out, and a shadowy outfit toiling behind gear as the crowd grinds and undulates in the foreground. Neither fish nor fowl, neither entirely noise nor dance-pop, those dichotomies, false or no, seem to have dissolved with the entry a year and a half ago of new member Sadie Laska of IUD and Extreme Violence. Laska joined Growing’s seemingly tight two-man collaboration — Joe DeNardo and Kevin Doria have been making music together since 1999 — after playing with the duo during a Growing-IUD tour. And Pumps is the first album the threesome has made together, working amid piles of effect boxes, synths, drum machines, Optigans, and guitars at Brooklyn’s Ocropolis studio.

“It was kind of scary at first for me,” Laska says, from the trio’s car, while in Seattle. “I didn’t know what was going to happen — they didn’t seem to have any strict way of doing anything. Instead they were kind of in this place where they wanted a new perspective, new ideas, so they were like, ‘Do whatever you want.'<0x2009>”

Laska went ahead and added the new vocal elements and samples, amplifying the subtle humor of tracks like the jittery, antically polyrhythmic “Highlight,” which almost suggests a spastic, giggly cousin of the Residents. The wit extends to the title and artwork of the disc, with its 1980s-esque pink lipstick gloss and its pinup girl ready to grotesquely eyeball the viewer.

“The title is supposed to be kind of funny,” Laska explains, “and I think the whole record is really light-hearted, which I don’t think people get at first.” The name directly refers to an instance when Doria’s girlfriend was packing a lot of shoes in a box labeled “Pumps.” “He was like, ‘I hate pumps,'<0x2009>” recalls Laska. “We joked about this being a feminine record, with a girl in the band and this music. After all, we have these beats — we’d say, ‘It’s pumpin’!'<0x2009>”

That’s what happens when you introduce a drum machine into the mix, although that doesn’t mean Growing intends to infiltrate clubland. “I think of it as almost a dance record, but not quite,” observes Laska. “It’s still off-kilter, and maybe you can’t dance to it. [Doria and DeNardo] came from a guitar-driven band, and we all come from these punk roots, so none of us grew up going to dance clubs and listening to dance music — that’s not what we were trying to make.”

Growing is, well, growing — not only in number, but in playful, new elastic directions as the group flips Laska’s vocals and fuses them with the beat. “We’re maybe more light-hearted,” Laska says. “Not that they were super-serious before. But I think now we really want people to have a good time and move around a little bit to it. In some ways we still play a sustained, long set. But now we do have these samples, and it’s kind of like … party music.” She chuckles at the absurdity of it. “Like the end-of-the-night kind of party.” 

GROWING

With Eric Copeland and Birds and Batteries

Wed/28, 8 p.m., $10–>$12

New Parish

579 18th St., Oakl.

(510) 444-7474

www.thenewparish.com

 

The residue

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The residue

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC “Drug boys steady shooting. The streets don’t give a damn. They’re filled with such pollution,” sings B.o.B on “Kids,” an interpolation of the coda from Vampire Weekend’s self-titled indie-pop gem. “The kids don’t stand a chance.”

But does B.o.B stand a chance? The Adventures of Bobby Ray (Atlantic) is pop, pop and more pop, embracing the current electro-pop-with-a-hip-hop-attitude zeitgeist with a smothering squeeze. If Kid Cudi took notes from Kanye’s 808 and Heartbreak on his intermittently fascinating Man on the Moon: End of Day; then B.o.B seems to channel Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool, with a dollop of Gym Class Heroes and Fall Out Boy thrown in.

B.o.B’s hip-pop excursion flies right into a raging debate over presence in hip-hop music, and whether there’s any left. The mainstream vanguard belongs to those willing to embrace rock and R&B clichés, whether it’s Lil Wayne fake-strumming a guitar on “Prom Queen” or, more nobly, Phonte Coleman crooning on Foreign Exchange’s “Daykeeper.” The hardcore underground belongs to growlers who can spit “16 hot bars” for days over “hit” beats lifted like Just Blaze’s “Exhibit C.” (For the uninitiated: a “bar” is a stanza in a verse.) Each camp seems to disappear into its chosen musical backdrop, driving the beat with narratives and themes, yet rarely emerging with an MC’s distinctly authoritative voice.

The recent death of Keith “Guru” Elam, who passed away April 20 after years spent battling cancer-related illnesses, underscores the stakes. On his work with Gang Starr, Guru not only excelled at storytelling, but at delivering classic lines that burned in your memory. Everyone knows “DWYCK” and “Lemonade is a popular drink and it still is/ I get more props and stunts than Bruce Willis.” Or how about this one (my personal favorite) from “The ? Remains”: “As the world revolves, wack crews lick my balls.”

Peace to one of the best to ever do it. And to be fair, Lil Wayne, DOOM, Mos Def, and a handful of others still deliver those prized “hip-hop quotables.” As for B.o.B? This may seem like a heavy burden for a 21 year-old kid who just released his first official album after years spent hyping himself with mixtapes like The Future and Hi! My Name is B.o.B. Once a hip-hop artist makes a best-seller, he becomes fodder for cruelly dismissive rap addicts clogging up chat boards, snarky rock critics penning capsule reviews for magazine slicks, and old-head journalists who slum down the media mountain to judge the latest craze against their idealized B-boy childhood. Each side will argue noisily and violently whether The Adventures of Bobby Ray spells the death or rebirth of hip-hop.

The turning point is “Nothin’ on You,” a shaggy-dog ballad that reached the summit of the Billboard singles chart. B.o.B leaves the hook to cowriter Bruno Mars, whose production crew the Smeezingtons (Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag”) aims to be the new-school version of the Neptunes. “Beautiful girls, all over the world/ I could be chasin’ but my time would be wasted/ They got nothin’ on you, baby,” sings Mars in a creamily soft voice.

In conversation, B.o.B is a likeable guy who doesn’t have much to say about the artistic process. Some musicians are erudite Questloves who can philosophize on any and every studio session, while others are Ghostface Killahs who just do it and let the historians sort out the details. B.o.B acknowledges that The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a sharp departure from his early mixtape material.

“I treated the early mixtapes like albums, but I was always holding back. I was holding back the alternative side,” he says, adding that rock bands like Coldplay are an influence. “I don’t want to be in one genre because doing that would be limiting me as an artist, if I was only being exposed to the pop crowd, or just to the urban crowd.”

Growing up Bobby Ray Simmons in Decatur, Ga., he was first discovered at 16 while performing at Club Crucial, a nightclub in Atlanta’s rough Bankhead neighborhood. As he subsequently signed deals with producer Jim Jonsin (Cypress Hill’s “Armada Latina”) and his Rebel Rock imprint, and then T.I.’s Grand Hustle camp, B.o.B toyed with idioms. His breakthrough single, the regional hit “Haterz Everywhere,” matched ATL bravado with a memorable hook. On The Future, he playfully riffed over a loop of Sam Cooke’s “Only Sixteen.” During appearances on the 2008 Rock the Bells tour, he interrupted his brief sets by bringing out a guitar and strumming an acoustic version of his marijuana ode, “Cloud 9.”

By B.o.B vs. Bobby Ray, he graduated to writing full-fledged pop songs, though none were as good as those found on The Adventures of Bobby Ray. Throughout his mixtapes, which were kind of a woodshedding process, B.o.B presented himself as an alien, a prodigal kid who doesn’t quite fit in with the teacher’s pets or the playground thugs. He frequently noted skipping high school to smoke weed and hang out on the streets. On “My Story,” he rapped, “Rebellion is just a side effect. Homicidal? Maybe. Suicidal? Yes.”

Today, B.o.B says, “It’s not as dark as it was. There’s still the residue there; the residue is on all my memories. It makes me who I am. It’s the strikes and blows that carve me as a person.” Finding success with a passion he nurtured since the third grade has undoubtedly helped. And career demands keep him out of trouble. “As I become more successful, it requires me to work more. I’ve got to be on my p’s and q’s. I gotta go to bed earlier. I can’t stay up as late as I used to. Sometimes I do party, but I’m like, alright, I gotta wake up in the morning.”

B.o.B may have grown out of his depression, but the ADD-manic energy remains. On The Adventures of Bobby Ray, the mixtape hiss and “down South” hood raps have been buffed away, leaving charismatic emotion and arena-ready entreaties like “Ghost in the Machine,” “Fame,” and “Airplanes.” A chorus line of high-profile guests, from Rivers Cuomo of Weezer and Hayley Williams of Paramore to Eminem and Lupe Fiasco, appear to ease the transition.

“Everyone listens to everything. Whatever’s going on in the hip-hop community, the pop people can see, and vice versa,” B.o.B says. When everything’s mixed up and genre lines blur, he adds, “Change is inevitable.” *

B.O.B

with Lupe Fiasco

Tues/4, 8 p.m. $34.50

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.ticketmaster.com

From Cleveland with love

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
From Cleveland with love

johnny@sfbg.com

MUSIC Baby Dee is not your generic person in a band, with dull quotes about the process of recording an album. Baby Dee has something to say, and she says it with light power, ever so occasionally punctuating a comment with a machine-gun laugh that’s love-at-first-hearing. Some would say Baby Dee’s music is more of an acquired taste, but the new A Book of Songs for Anne Marie (Drag City) strips her musicality down to its essence, and the result, while owing a generative debt to German Lieder, is crystalline in a manner that trumps more affectation-laden contemporaries like Joanna Newsom and the musician most often compared to Dee, her friend Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. Mabel Mercer comes to mind. On the eve of Dee’s SF visit, I got her on the horn, and the result was good enough that I didn’t want to write or talk around it. So here it is — 100-proof Baby Dee.

On the use of the Baby Dee song “Cavalry” in Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ movie To Die Like A Man: “He told me [it was the heart of the film] when I met him and I thought he was just blowing smoke up my ass. But so many reviews have said that he lavished all his gifts on that one scene.

How truly wonderful. Most people get a song in a movie and just an inconsequential fragment is playing in the background, but here the whole movie stops and everyone listens to the song — you can’t ask for more than that.

On her hometown: “I love Cleveland. It took me a long time to love Cleveland. I hated it all the time growing up. I left when I was 18 years old like a bullet out of a gun and never went back for more than a day at a time for almost 30 years.

The house I actually live in now, my recurring nightmare was to walk into the front door of that house. That was my end-of-the-world dream, instead of a holocaust or a great tsunami.

About ten years ago I went back there and ended up staying because my parents were in such bad shape. I was just experimenting with good behavior. [Laughs]

When they died I was stuck there, I’d lost my apartment in New York. I quit music and had a tree business. Then I woke up one morning and realized that I liked Cleveland. But it took me a lifetime. I’ve loved it ever since.

I never really toured the states, I’d toured Europe, and seeing what the rest of America is like made me love Cleveland. In Cleveland there is zero attitude at all. Nobody is cool in Cleveland, and if they are, it sure as hell isn’t because they live in Cleveland. The cool cities in America are New York, New Orleans — or what’s left of it — and San Francisco. In it’s own crazy way Vegas is cool. And maybe Niagara Falls.

New York is the city that never sleeps. I used to call Cleveland the city that shits the bed.”

On Marc Almond: “I adore, I worship Marc Almond. He’s one of the greatest people in the world in addition to being a great singer. People tend to think he’s a sweetheart, but in his case it’s absolutely true — he’s as good as gold. And we’ve got history — I gave him reasons to not be as good as gold to me. [Laughs] He’s just a prince.”

On German Lieder and classical music: “It had its influence on me, but in strange ways. When I grew up, I would leave the room when people would play Schubert. I couldn’t take it. It was an irrational hatred, and I haven’t had many musical ones. But there was history there — we took piano lessons, and my father had sort of been cast [by life] in the role of the Erl King with the dying child. Ooo, oogedy-boogedy, don’t go there! That kind of thing. We had to play some simple child’s version of Schubert’s Der Erlkönig, and my father was really into it without even having self-awareness why. He’d say “Play that one again” over and over, not even realizing it was about the death of his own soul. Hideous.

I was more at home with really, really old music. As a matter of fact I avoided the entire 19th century. It isn’t that there wasn’t beautiful music — Chopin, Beethoven — but I avoided the whole thing. I discovered Bach and went backwards from there. I was fascinated by Gregorian music and I finally got as a far as the Renaissance and became obsessed with [Giovanni Pieruigi da Palestrina] and the Spanish composer [Juan Evo] Morales [Ayma] and [Tomas Luis de] Victoria.”

On Joey Arias: “It’s not like Joey Arias is underrated. He might be the most beloved living drag singer. But he’s sort of ghettoized, very unfairly. I think he’s one of the greatest vocalists alive. If you’ve ever heard Joey get serious, there’s no greater heartbreaker.”

On her relation to the New York club scene: “The whole time cool things were happening in New York, I was in some dusty old piano loft in the South Bronx playing Palestrina on an organ.”

On her drink of choice: “It depends on when and where. If it’s before dinner, J&B Scotch on the rocks. If it’s after, it would definitely be Armagnac.”

BABY DEE

With Karl Blau, Jeffery Manson

Fri/30, 9 p.m., $12

Amnesia

853 Valencia, SF

(415) 970-0012

www.amnesiathebar.com

Can’t stay away

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Can’t stay away

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC “What can you do at the age of 44 that’s relevant?” a philosophical Too Short asks over brunch at the Buttercup in Oakland. “It can’t be good; it’s gotta be critic-proof.”

Seldom can you trace an entire artistic milieu back to one person, yet with Bay Area rap, you can. And his name is Too Short, a.k.a. Todd Shaw. In 1980, when the 14-year-old Short moved from L.A. to Oakland, rap was still considered a New York City phenomenon, but this didn’t stop him from making tapes to sell on the bus and the block. Between 1983 and 1986, he cut three discs on local label 75 Girls before forming his own Dangerous Music, whose first album, Short’s Born to Mack (1987), was soon re-released by Jive Records.

But after 14 albums on Jive — three gold, five platinum, one double platinum — Short Dog has gone independent. His label, once named Short Records, then Up All Nite, has been rechristened Dangerous Music, which released his Internet-only pre-album, Still Blowin’, on April 7. The most exciting news is that he’s returned from Atlanta to make music in the Bay, as well as his native L.A.

“What brought me back West was just the love, period,” he says. “People love me other places, but the West Coast love is unconditional. Not only in the Bay. It’s the same in L.A.

“Even in Atlanta,” he continues, “a lot of what I wrote was Oakland music. Oakland gives me the inspiration to write songs.”

Beyond the Bay, Too Short is as seminal a figure as Ice-T, bringing two major innovations to rap: profanity and pimpin’. These days, when half an MC’s verse gets muted on the radio due to graphic content, it’s hard to imagine rap without dirty lyrics, but it was a teenage Short who opened this Pandora’s box, with hardcore classics like “Blow Job Betty.”

“It’s not about pimps so much as having game,” Too Short says, yet the dirty rhymes inevitably meshed with Oakland’s cult of the pimp, whose ur-text is the locally-shot blaxploitation film, The Mack (1973). His much-imitated signature word, “biatch,” once caused controversy, though America fell in love with it after Dave Chappelle’s Rick James skit. As Short raps on the hit title track of his 16th album, Blow the Whistle (Jive 2006), “He got it from me.” Having discovered and recorded with Lil Jon even makes Short a pivotal figure in crunk.

 

JIVE JIVE

Unlike Ice-T or other contemporaries, Short remains a viable hitmaker. Blow the Whistle reached No. 14 on Billboard (No. 7 on the rap chart) and spawned a second hit, “Keep Bouncin’,” featuring Snoop Dogg and will.i.am, who produced it. Yet Jive refused to promote it, or even make a video, despite Snoop and will’s offer to work on it for free — one symptom of a deteriorating relationship between artist and label, which changed focus in the late 1990s to concentrate on teen pop like Britney Spears. Despite its lack of support, Short says that Jive “wouldn’t bow out gracefully,” instead holding him up for months with talk of a major retrospective with four new tracks that never materialized.

“When it’s near the end of the contract,” he says. “No matter how much they made off you, they don’t want to settle it in a humane way. It was clear their only intent was, ‘You must leave here not famous.'<0x2009>”

“I’m a realist,” he says about Jive pursuing more lucrative pop while abandoning a flagship artist who made the label millions. “It leaves a bad taste in your mouth. But there are no regrets. There wouldn’t be the legendary rapper Too Short if I didn’t get in my early years at Jive.” Eventually Short turned in a new album, Get Off the Stage (2007) — which, without promotion by Short or Jive, still hit No. 21 on the rap chart — in exchange for freedom.

 

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Unlike E-40, who left Jive for Reprise, Short Dog opted to go independent. “I could have got a major label deal two weeks after I left Jive,” Short says. “But I’m not going to get 100,000 first-week scans, and that’d be it.”

Both statements are probably true; he’s high-profile and relevant enough to get signed. Yet given the state of the industry and the youth-bias of major label rap, he’s unlikely to go platinum. But platinum’s a scarce commodity nowadays. And much like the nearly 40-year-old Snoop, Short still reliably makes hits and sells records. And he doesn’t intend to stop.

“I was smart enough to realize when the support wasn’t there, I could support myself,” he states matter-of-factly, without a trace of bravado.

Still Blowin’, Short says, “is just an appetizer for the upcoming menu,” his full-blown 2011 disc whose title is “so fly” he won’t unveil it yet. “I can’t just throw another album out there in this market. I need to warm it up, and this Internet album’s to feel out which direction I want to go in.” One direction is mixing in songs with a little more food for thought, even flirting with the idea of falling in love on the standout “Playa Card.”

“This is all premeditated,” he says. “I’m talking lots of shit, but I pick subjects where I can give a little more depth.”

“My last and final goal in hip-hop is to shatter that age-limit myth,” he continues. “It’s totally against everything this hip-hop industry is about. I’ll be 45 in 2011, and I guarantee you, I’ll drop an album and it’ll be the shit.

“I see it like I’m a jazz or a blues musician,” he continues. “I should be a rapper when I can’t even get off the stool, just sit there, nod my head, and do the show. I should be in a Vegas show with showgirls and shit. I’m going to rap till the words don’t come out.”

Ring ring

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Ring ring

kimberly@sfbg.com

MUSIC Take a page from the Peaches lesson plan: there are a few similarities between whipping a mob of too-cool-for-school hipsters and jaded insiders into a silly, sweltering mess — and rocking a classroom of bored youngsters. Sweet-voiced and sweet-tempered, Sleigh Bells vocalist Alexis Krauss knows this all too well: as a Teach for America educator, she was once charged with motivating antsy 10-year-olds. “You have to be high energy — it’s hard work!” the 24-year-old exclaims merrily over a gas-and-go line as she and bandmate Derek Miller, 28, once of screamo-hardcore outfit Poison the Well, tool through rural Pennsylvania on tour with Major Lazer.

Sleigh Bells’ performances have been a precious few since late last year, when the Brooklyn twosome stumbled into a few shows as part of CMJ Music Marathon in New York City and ended up being declared breakout belles by sites like Pitchfork and Stereogum. “We weren’t really even ready to start playing till December 2009,” Krauss demurs. “But we got lucky and met the right people at the right time.”

The frontwoman has had her share of luck: at 13, she was tapped by producers to sing and play bass in teen-pop act RubyBlue. “Basically it was like all those stories that you hear about those bands: a factory,” she recalls. “It was great in that I learned a lot at a young age, but eye-opening in terms of the darker side of the music business — in the sense that you have no say in the decisions going on around you.”

Disillusionment with music followed, but Krauss met Miller in an almost mythic manner two years ago: at a Brazilian restaurant in NYC, he was waiting on her when her mother helpfully volunteered her daughter’s services as a singer. Since then it’s been a perfect storm of good fortune for the duo. On the strength of a few demos — part of a trove that Miller had been working on in his bedroom since leaving his old band in search of a womanly voice — the pair were embraced by MIA. Miller ended up doing production on MIA’s forthcoming full-length, and her NEET Recordings is coreleasing Sleigh Bells’ debut, Treats (Mom + Pop), on May 11.

MIA’s and Sleigh Bells’ simpatico approach comes through loud and clear in their mutual affection for hip-hop pastiche and post-punk dissonance. Tracks like “A/B Machines” call out to a makeshift dance floor with four-alarm urgency, perpetually revving Link Wray twang and gristly crunch. The janky-cool “Crown on the Ground” draws power from its bleeding, in-the-red meeting ground between hip-hop heads and noise generators. “Ring Ring” comes off as Sleigh Bells at its most soulful — rolling along on an acoustic guitar vamp, finger-click snap, and Krauss’ girlish rap about a sweet and sultry 16. If this is the sound of summer — an early contender for summer song of 2010 — it’s summer in the city, with guitars that sound like jackhammers and ambulance sirens. Even the playful “At the Beach” is driven by rave-ready horn blasts and the type of bass thump you’d ordinarily hear from a passing Jeep.

The pair went into the studio in January, re-recording some songs and assembling new ones. And while Miller still writes the majority of material, Krauss says the two are growing into their roles and becoming more collaborative. In any case, they didn’t clean things up too much. “We added just a few more tools at our disposal to create a better sound,” she explains. “So we hope that it will be everything people want it to be.” What do Sleigh Bells want? “We like people dancing, singing along, and losing their minds.”

SLEIGH BELLS

With Yeasayer

April 17, 9 p.m., $20

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.livenation.com

Now that we’re older

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Now that we’re older

By Peter Galvin

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC There’s a civil war afoot in the Hot Chip camp. Caught between tongue-in-cheek club-fillers and more melodic balladry, the U.K. electro-pop act continues to divide its audience by refusing to choose a definitive side and sound.

Duo and long-time friends, Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard have been plagued by the impression that they are largely a singles band, earmarking playlist-ready tracks like “Boy From School” and “Ready For The Floor” from otherwise uneven albums. Such is the scarlet letter left by Coming On Strong, their initial 2004 release with DFA Records, whose name is indelibly linked to a number of playlist-ready remixes. Following the band’s subsequent jump to EMI Records, around the 2008 release of their third album Made in the Dark, it became clear that the pair were ready to take a step away from the ephemeral nature that plagues not only their band’s first two releases, but much of modern dance music. Made in the Dark saw the band begin to experiment with more personal narratives, such as in the standout “We’re Looking For a Lot of Love.” Still, the collection of songs was more suggestive of growing pains than graduation.

After Dark‘s mixed advances, the release of One Life Stand represents the important moment in every successful band’s career, the point where it finally decides whether it’s going to continue rehashing a fruitful formula or take a risk, commit to something new and hope that the audience will stick around. As album opener “Thieves in the Night” comes over the speakers with the lyrics “happiness is what we all want,” it’s tough to find traces of the Hot Chip that was “sick of motherfuckers trying to tell me that they’re down with Prince.” The album title itself announces a band seeking something more real and permanent than an album that college kids bump at their summer parties.

Perhaps fearful that long-time fans might initially be turned off by the new direction, Taylor and Goddard make sure to hit you with the bangers right off the bat, four songs that recall their previous work in tempo if not content. But even these songs are free of the band’s trademark irony. They explore love and yearning rather than ride high on the repetition of goofy catch-phrases. In addition to a distinct lyrical maturity, the new songs are also increasingly densely layered. While they imply an enormous backdrop of influences, you get the impression Hot Chip has moved past paying homage, instead simply wishing to explore new territory in an accessible way.

Past this initial burst of bluster, One Life Stand introduces what may well be the new sound of Hot Chip — ballads. Deeply personal and largely humorless, songs like “Brothers,” “Alley Cats,” and “Slush” show that the band wants to connect with its audience on a more profound level — and they’re willing to drop the irony to do it. “Brothers” is candidly about Taylor loving his friends like brothers, a sentiment that might have embarrassed him had it appeared on Coming Up Strong. Hot Chip has matured, moved beyond posturing and caring what people think, making the album a refreshing reintroduction to a band that some dismissed as a couple of smart alecks.

It can be bittersweet watching a band grow up and define itself. Though One Life Stand is not without its missteps, I’m glad Hot Chip is doing what it wants rather than pandering to the expectations of an established audience. They like dancing and they like ballads, why should they have to choose? As lines are being drawn regarding the band’s inevitable shift away from sardonic dance music, it’s hard not to wonder whether Hot Chip even cares. If it does, it probably feels that its listeners are the ones having a hard time growing up.

HOT CHIP

with the xx

Fri/16, 8 p.m., $29.50

Fox Theatre

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

1 (800) 745-3000

www.myspace.com/hotchip

An MPC fiend at work

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
An MPC fiend at work

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Few producers have pushed forward the aesthetic of West Coast underground hip-hop like Exile. His dynamic production style navigates a certain uneasiness at the heart of Californian reveries: warm pulses of boom-bap ride over blown-out bass lines and dirtied, jazz-strut melodies. Yet among the towering forces of Dr. Dre gangster pulp and Madlib beat tapes ad infinitum, Exile has been something of a submerged anonymity.

Exile (born Aleksander Manfredi) broke out into the Los Angeles scene at the brink of the millennium as part of the duo Emanon, formed in half by dexterous lyricist and singer Aloe Blacc. In reality, they had already been hustling an arsenal of cassettes since the mid-1990s, championing sun-bleached soundscapes and whimsical verses on the grind. It set the framework for Exile’s prodigious output during the last few years (holds breath): another decisive Emanon full-length, 2004’s The Waiting Room on Shaman Work; full production in the vein of Marley Marl for two freshmen rap debuts, Blu’s impassioned 2007 Below the Heavens on Sound in Color, and Fashawn’s solid 2009 Boy Meets World on One Records; a versatile 2006 beat conductor showcase, Dirty Science (also on Sound and Color); and the 2009 concept album Radio on Plug Research, which reworked a pastiche of sound bytes, vocals, and loops culled from Los Angeles’ AM/FM frequencies.

In any free time scrapped among those projects, Exile also helped spearhead a new form of live performance with the Akai MPC, a powerful drum machine and sampler tool henceforth used only for production. “The MPC is able to do almost anything any instrument can do if it’s programmed right,” Exile tells me over the phone. “Buttons allow you to trigger and manipulate sounds — and that’s exactly what music is.” No longer limited to mixing, scratching, and juggling prerecorded sounds on the turntables, the producer can build, layer, and freak music from its most basic building blocks. “The idea is to have your own instrument, made up of other instruments: a chopped up guitar, horn, bass line, and drums; then add some synth keys,” Exile says. “You have all these instruments at your fingertips and you can rework them.” Simply put, Exile brings a hip-hop producer’s analog studio to the stage.

Whether flipping robotic percussive breaks and lurching sub-bass that reach into your gut and pile-drive your sternum or reimagining Afrika Bambaataa with kindred spirit DJ Day, Exile continually impresses and body rocks the crowd in his live show. Sure, some talented laptop performers have incorporated similar techniques into their sets from behind glowing Apple computer screens, but it’s thrilling to see Exile openly at work in front of the audience. The visual aspect is key as he demonstrates unparalleled skills on the machine, tapping buttons in rapid-fire wizardry like a future-funked Thelonious Monk.

Exile invokes a natural musicality when playing the equipment. This makes his claims that the MPC is a real and serious instrument all the more convincing. “The first instrument I learned was an accordion, which has a lot of buttons,” he says, amused by the thought. “Then I picked up the keyboard and some drums. But I really learned to play the drums with the MPC.”

Exile was that kid in junior high finger-drumming syncopated rhythms on classroom desks and beat boxing in the hallways. Hooked on hip-hop and electronic jams, he was inspired to make programmed music with whatever tools he could find. “The first song I ever recreated was Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” with a turntable and two-tape decks,” Exile recalls. “I recorded a two-bar section of a song, rewound so there were two bars of empty space, recorded two bars again, and then empty space again. Do that for three minutes, then go back and fill in the empty space, and add another tape onto that.” Repeat that DIY method until the sounds of a loving genius knock out of the speakers in full android glory.

This restless impulse to create took Exile down a long road experimenting with four-track recorders, Roland samplers, and even helium balloons before he laid his hands on the MPC. Now, he’s a certified fiend, transforming the way we see hip-hop as much as we hear it. And there’s much more to come. 

EXILE

Fri/16, 9 p.m., $5–$10

Som SF

2925 16th St., SF

(415) 558-8521

www.som-bar.com

Let’s hear it for the Boy Boy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
Let’s hear it for the Boy Boy

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC One morning, I woke up to a call from a woman named Tasha. “Messy Marv wants to speak to you,” she says. Uh-oh, I think, what’d I do? Mess isn’t the kind of guy who calls just to chop it up. “He wants you to write an article,” she says. This isn’t my usual method, but given the difficulty of touching down with the Fillmore District native, I’ll tape first and ask questions later. Mess has largely been out of state since getting out of jail (for a weapons charge) in late 2007, and his absence has inspired controversy in the Moe, so I’m wondering if he wants to address it.

But Mess has other things on his mind when he phones from Miami.

“Let’s talk about 400,000 units independently,” he begins, an impressive tally of cumulative sales in the Bay. Mess’s fanbase extends well beyond the region; he’s been featured on discs by the likes of Killer Mike and Tech9ine, Snoop Dogg shouts him out on Malice in Wonderland (Doggystyle/Priority, 2009), and he provided a 20-year-old Keyshia Cole her first real exposure on his third album, Still Explosive (M Ent., 2001). Cole’s returning the favor by recording a single with Mess, “Luv Somebody,” for his album, The Cooking Channel, slated for July 7.

But even this isn’t what he wants to talk about. Right now Mess is all about his corporation, Scalen, LLC, whose name derives from one of Mess’ aliases, Messcalen. Scalen began as Mess’s record label, which he recently rebranded Click Clack Records to signify its integration into the new company whose other divisions include Scalen Films and Scalen Clothing.

“The beginning of my career was all music,” Mess says. “But now I’m a CEO.” In the era of Jay-Z and P. Diddy, most rappers have aspired to their own corporations. Yet in the perpetually underfunded Bay, such dreams tend to remain unrealized. But Mess, who’s been moving units since age 15, appears to be realizing the goal. Scalen Films already has two DVDs in the can for release later this year: Gigantic, a documentary on Mess’ life, and All Gas No Breaks, his dramatic debut. He’s shopping his reality show, Mr. Ghetto Celebrity, whose trailer can be seen on his Web site, scalenllc.com. He’s got dudes like Big Boi wearing Scalen t-shirts and plans to launch two lines in the fall: Cupcakes (for women) and Slick Talk (for men). But the most immediate project is a 12-disc, limited edition set of Mess’s back catalog, Project Suppastarr, due April 1. Priced at $50 and including a Scalen shirt and autographed posters, the project is designed “to give the consumers something for their money.” (“It’s a $340 value,” he claims on his Web site infomercial.)

As we wrap up, I ask Mess about the Fillmore controversy. Two Fillmore rappers formerly on Click Clack Records, Young Boo and M-Kada, have released a harsh diss video, “Last of Us,” challenging Mess’ hood credentials. It’s included on Where’s Messy Marv? (Homewrecka Ent., 2010), an entire DVD devoted to Mess bashing. All this is on top of a major beef last year with his childhood friend and collaborator, San Quinn, which, despite being quashed, has left lingering ill-will in Fillmore. Mess, however, just laughs at the turmoil.

“You grow out of situations,” he says. “This is based on me growing up, and a lot of people don’t understand that. I just look at it like promotion — they my street team. I’m not paying for once.”

Nonetheless, Mess wants to leave the drama behind, going so far as to rebrand himself as the Boy Boy Young Mess for this new stage of his career. “I’ve transformed into another person. I’m a whole new entertainer, man, father. I’ll still always be ‘Messy Marv.’ But a lot came with that name, so I’m going to leave it where it is.”

Oh my gay!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Oh my gay!

CLUB/MUSIC Gay wads. Sissies. Fatties. Fags. Butches. Twinks. Offended? Don’t be — that’s the guest list for Stay Gold, the sickest queer dance party in the Mission. This month the party celebrates its four-year anniversary, inviting you to self-declare along with the rest of the high femmes, boys, bois, nerd alerts, nellies, and an entire pack of sexy dance-dance revolutionaries.

The all-inclusive party throws down its jams the last Wednesday of each month at the Make-Out Room and has grown from a dedicated crowd of 50 at its start to a full-on 450-person freak-fest in 2010. Stay Gold’s founders/promoters/resident DJs Leah Perloff (DJ Rapid Fire) and Danielle Jackson (DJ Pink Lightning) blame the party’s popularity on its welcoming attitude.

“Stay Gold is a queer party, not a lesbian party,” says Perloff over coffee and banana bread. “We’ve never put imagery on flyers because we didn’t want to rule anyone out.”

“It started out as mainly women, but it’s turned into everybody, which is a hard thing to do — get all queers at one event,” Jackson says.

All queer and all hot, Stay Gold draws in a ridiculously cool crowd. Super rad vintage threads bump and grind with killer style choices of all breeds. The haircuts, the personalities, the dance moves— this crowd is bangin’. “Ya. It’s a super hot queer mix,” Jackson agrees with a smirk, noting the event’s tagline: “White hot cruising and solid gold dancing.”

Stay Gold started as a tribute to a friend of Jackson and Perloff, Sarah Tucker, who was killed on her bicycle by a hit-and-run in 2006. Jackson and “Tucker,” as they called her, had put together PYT, a gay dance party named after a certain Michael Jackson song. After Tucker passed away, Jackson and Perloff decided to keep the party going in her honor, switching the name to reflect their lost friend’s recent golden birthday. “Tucker would totally approve of Stay Gold — minus the fact that we play a little hip-hop. That was always her rule: no hip-hop at PYT,” Jackson says.

To balance it out, Tucker’s favorite song, “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” by Indeep is the party’s anthem. Other Stay Gold staples include “Finally” by CeCe Peniston, “Walking on Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox, and “Pussy (Real Good)” by Jacki-O. “People want to hear the jams,” Perloff says with a very serious face.

Along with the usual DJ mix, the anniversary party includes a special live set from Double Dutchess, who Perloff describes as an “epic booty bass, babelicious, dance jam duo.” Already packed tit-to-tit during its regular event, this one’s gonna be bananas.

Whether it’s suggestion or a rule, take it from Perloff: “No parking on the dance floor.” 

STAYGOLD FOUR-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Wed/31, 10:30pm, $3

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

www.makeoutroom.com

Stupid fantastic

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Stupid fantastic

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Does the dream ever die? Especially when you’re talking ’bout the Stooges, running on fumes of the glorious yet star-crossed Raw Power (Columbia, 1973), in 1974? For that still-influential combo it all came down to what Stooges guitarist James Williamson calls “a very prolonged death march across the United States,” culminating with two February 1974 shows. At the first, the typically provocative Pop got cold-cocked in a Michigan biker bar. Then a few nights later, in a performance documented on Metallic K.O. (Skydog, 1977), the band caught a hail of bottles, cameras, and such hurled from the crowd.

“People really throwing bottles at your head really gets your attention,” Williamson marvels from Silicon Valley, where he now lives and worked, until retirement, as an electronics engineer and Sony VP. “We were a little bit … I don’t know what you could say about us — stupid probably captures it! We just stood up there defiantly, egging these guys on.”

Today you can’t help but feel a little vindicated for Williamson, Pop, and drummer Scott Asheton (R.I.P., late guitarist and Raw Power bassist Ron Asheton). When we spoke, the affable, down-to-earth Williamson was looking forward to playing with the Stooges at the group’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction March 15, and to the April 13 release of the two-CD Legacy Edition and four-CD-DVD Deluxe Edition of the legendary proto-punk album he wrote with Pop. The deluxe treatment of Raw Power (available at www.iggyandthestoogesmusic.com) includes the newly remastered original David Bowie mix of the LP (various Stooges have expressed their hatred of the first stylized mix, which finds new clarity post-remastering); Georgia Peaches, a live performance at Atlanta’s Richards club in October 1973; a disc of rarities, outtakes, and alternate mixes; a making-of documentary; a book; five prints; and a Japanese picture-sleeve reproduction of a “Raw Power”/”Search and Destroy” 7-inch.

The whole thing is a treasure trove to rival 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions (Rhino Handmade, 1999), considering the quantity of the previously unreleased tracks, in addition to the notoriety of the partially bootlegged Georgia Peaches show (Ron Asheton owned a cassette of the show and after clueing in Stooges archivist Robert Matheu, the untouched original board tapes were unearthed). You have to love the bluesy prominence of Scott Thurston’s roadhouse piano and Pop’s crazily inspired intro to, say, “I Need Somebody”: “I’ll see every Georgia chick get down and — suck my ass. Ten Georgia Peaches up my ass; 10 Georgia Peaches stoned on grass; 10 Georgia Peaches next is coke; 10 Georgia Peaches ain’t no joke …”

Williamson remembers the Hotlantans as fun-loving: “Richards was a dinner-date kind of place with tablecloths and a dinner-slash-bar kind of thing. We’d do two sets a night for a week, and these guys [were] bringing their dates to dinner, and here come the Stooges, and the singer is up in their faces, messing with their girlfriends.” He chuckles. “You know, you can’t make this stuff up!” At another set, Stooges fan Elton John, who happened to be in Altanta, decided to surprise the combo by materializing onstage in a gorilla costume. “He was lucky he took his head off because I was getting really pissed at him,” says Williamson. “And I was about to do something not good to him!”

High times for the band that had known each other since tenth grade — Ron Asheton played bass in James Williamson’s first group, and Williamson hung out at the initial Stooges basement rehearsals. If there were any hard feelings when Pop shed the original Stooges with the exception of second guitarist Williamson, they seem to have faded. Asked by Pop to fly to London to write material for Raw Power, Williamson vividly recalls the making of his first album as productive. “I wrote almost all the songs on Raw Power up in my room in London on an acoustic guitar,” he remembers. “In fact, that acoustic guitar is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum. It’s easier for me to hear the true sound of the chords, the combination of chord changes.” Pop was also easy to work with — “a very nice person and very intelligent and sincere.”

“I made some mistakes on that album in the solos and stuff, but who cares?” Williamson says now. “What matters is how it comes across.” In the studio, the guitarist simply played, pulling out the caterwauling, proto-thrash solos for “Search and Destroy” and “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” until he saw the rest of the band nodding in the control room. “The music was all mine,” he explains. “So I didn’t know if it was any good or not — or anything about it. But I was having a great time and I was making money. I mean, what was not to like about it?”

Now, after working in high tech for more than 30 years, Williamson’s writing new songs with Pop (“It’s just as easy now as it was then”) and anticipating the rerelease of the remastered Pop- and Williamson-penned Kill City (Bomp, 1977). He’s found what might be the choicest retirement job ever, as a member of the Stooges. “It was a big stretch going from the Stooges to calculus and differential equations, but I did it!” he says, “and I’ve never really regretted it.” Only Williamson can claim the next trajectory — “from a Stooge to a suit to Stooge!” he chortles.

Endless hookup

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Endless hookup

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Where are the turntablist masters of yore? They’ve gone missing, replaced by the likes of the Hood Internet.

It’s true. The art of the hip-hop mix, once protected by the Skratch Piklz and the X-Men (a.k.a. X-ecutioners) and the Beat Junkies and Triple Threat, has returned to the province of the sound editors, just like in the early 1980s. The problem was the turntable itself. A painful lesson of the ugly aughts was to never trust technology. Hardware emerges, changes, and is destroyed according to consumerist tastes. The alchemical idea may be subject to manipulation by the likes of Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch, and Eric Schmidt, but it is eternal in its adaptability to any mechanical form.

So while scratch DJs take to message boards and cry over Panasonic allegedly discontinuing its Technics 1200 line (which turned out be a false rumor), rockists and electronic heads open their laptops, launch Serato and Reason software, and get to mixing. It’s not like those turntable masters aren’t missed, though. While they spun and cut soul, funk, and hip-hop with finely nuanced techniques, like 16th century woodblock cutters, the new editors and mashup artists skip stones across genres, leaving small ripples of pop delight that quickly dissipate.

It’s a different aesthetic, that’s for sure. The Hood Internet consists of Chicago-based musicians Aaron Brink and Steve Reidell. Both moved there after finishing college — Brink at the University of Michigan and Reidell at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Initially they formed May or May Not, a “noisy pop band,” as Reidell called it, and made beats on the side for rappers “you would have never have heard of” until producers like Girl Talk and Them Jeans inspired them to create the Hood Internet Web site in 2007. Using Acid Pro and Ableton Live, they flooded the Web with smart, imaginative mashups of the Shins vs. Crime Mob, and Jim Jones vs. Daft Punk. It was a hobby: Reidell was an art director for Smart Bar, and the site’s array of cheeky collages is testament to his superior design skills. Brink is a clinical psychologist. They’ve performed around town and occasionally landed spot gigs on the weekend, but this spring marks their first extended national tour.

“I left my job earlier this year to be able to focus on the Hood Internet,” Reidell says. He’s calling from a video set in Chicago, and the resulting clip will be for “Chicago 3016,” a new single the Hood Internet produced with local MC Kid Static. It’s a reference to Chicago’s failed bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. “There’s a great hip-hop scene here right now, from Kid Static to the Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall. Freddie Gibbs, he’s from Gary, Indiana, but he’s basically Chicago since we’re such close neighbors.”

Unless they’re showing some hometown love — they recently mashed together buzzing Chi-town newcomers Bin Laden Blowin’ Up’s “Chi Don’t Dance” with Broken Bells’ “Citizen” — the Hood Internet tends to use radio hits, flipping recognizable raps over rock and dance tracks. Hence, The Hood Internet Mixtape Vol. 4 includes “Bring the Tabloid Sores,” where Chuck D.’s stentorian boom from “Bring the Noise” rides over Nosaj Thing’s eerie electronic remix of Health’s “Tabloid Sores.” Less brilliantly, it also includes “Swaggin’ Out,” which pairs Soulja Boy’s muttering boast from “Turn My Swag On” with Joe Jackson’s smooth jazz-pop “Steppin’ Out.” “There’s a handful of irony in what we do. The mashup itself is an ironic form of music,” Reidell says. “We live in an age where anyone can do it if you’ve got Garageband and download some a cappellas.”

The Hood Internet operates in a pop context. It isn’t simply plundering black music for source material and reshaping it for white hipsters. Collected into the ongoing Hood Internet Mixtape series, these sounds represent how much of the audience, black and white, consumes music today. To the duo’s credit, their approach is more innovative than the hordes of mixtape DJs that artlessly smack Lil Wayne “exclusives” together with little care for flow or context, or even the old-school jocks who scratch and blend like it was still the ’90s. But these tracks also demonstrate how hip-hop has been reduced by much of its audience into a series of sugary sensations — again, the skipping stones analogy. It’s music for partying, getting laid, and working out at the gym, not for intellectual exploration. You can’t blame the Hood Internet’s clever and innovative response for the current pop miasma, though.

“In recent months I’ve digested the new Freeway & Jake One album, Pill’s 4180 mixtape and Freddie Gibbs’ mixtapes as intensely as the CFCF and Caribou album,” Reidell answers when asked if he takes hip-hop seriously. “That said, a lot of pop music — and a lot of hip-hop falls into that being that it’s popular — is disposable. It’s not because it’s hip-hop, it’s because a lot of pop music is disposable. The Hood Internet mixes a lot of that stuff. But while we might mix Gucci Mane one day, we’ll mix a really thoughtful Anti-Pop Consortium track the next day.

“I think there’s some value to it because it’s introducing people to things they might not otherwise have heard,” he continues. “It’s time-stamped to a certain degree, and it’s for partying. But there’s value to that, too. People like to have a good time.”

THE HOOD INTERNET

With Tobacco (of Black Moth Super Rainbow) and the New Slave

Sat/27, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

A lost San Francisco saga

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
A lost San Francisco saga

arts@sfbg.com

Part one of “A lost San Francisco saga” ran in the March 17, 2010 issue of the Guardian. It can be found at www.sfbg.com/2010/03/16/lost-san-francisco-saga.

MUSIC In 1971, Herman Eberitzsch Jr. III decided it was time to record and somehow save his organic experiences of playing at clubs and avant-garde cafes in the city. He assembled a quartet from his “grapevine of connections” — including good friend Joe West, a Rasputin-looking guitarist, whom Eberitzsch originally met at the Post Office — and booked sessions at Roy Chen’s recording studio in Chinatown. With no previous studio background, Eberitzsch rehearsed the musicians, taught them the arrangements, and guided their inspiration in a quest for abysmal funk and thunderous jazz. These sessions produced an enchanting trip into “Rapture of the Deep,” a left-field meditation on rebellious passion, “Funk Punk,” and the ethereal moral fable “Dark Angels.” The unrestrained songs pull you head over heels into their internal worlds; their oceanic tides carry you great distances. Still, Atlantic Records saw no commercial success in the tapes, finding them much too experimental, and shelved the project.

Undaunted, Eberitzsch invested in a new quintet, Motion, “to bring some bread to the table.” He met Coke Escovedo along the way and joined his frenetic Latin outfit Azteca in 1973. During the first rehearsal, Eberitzsch called out “I got a tune!” as soon as a silence held the conversation. He taught them heavy joints that “came from outer space” — including “Life is a Tortured Love Affair,” “Make It Sweet,” and “Rebirth.” These songs would help land the contract for Coke’s seminal solo debut. They demonstrated Eberitzsch’s gift for concise, soulful lyricism, a quality he would cultivate over the course of his songwriting ventures.

Feeling reassured of his own talents and industry potential after such a success, Eberitzsch moved on to spearhead a new project with his close friend and lead singer, Johnny Lovett. He herded the grapevine once again, including songstress Linda Tillery, and brought Motion to Wally Heider studios in 1974. Always one to incorporate past experiences, Eberitzsch fused the propulsive pathos of Latin funk into his broad-flowing musical direction. The verdant, multilayered arrangements and groove-laden percussion were augmented by surging horn riffs and a lush string section.

These songs by Motion were tighter in form, shaped in part by Eberitizsch’s focus on concise lyrical narratives: testaments of joy and calls for solidarity in the face of injustice. It was the wake of the civil rights era, although America’s failed political experiment of dreaming national unity did not so much destroy idealism as redirect its boundless strength to a more grassroots level. “Our music was simply a product of people coming together in a community and expressing ourselves,” says Eberitzsch. “It was a groundswell of inspiration.” But Columbia also “didn’t hear it at the time,” and another set of tapes found their way to Eberitzsch’s basement.

These setbacks still didn’t disillusion Eberitzsch. He recorded at Different Fur Studios in 1976 and established the loose framework for an adventurous modern soul sound he would continue to develop and transform for the next five years. He worked extensively on Lee Oskar’s solo effort and collaborated once again with Greg Errico. He would record more challenging work in the late 1970s and early ’80s, fragmenting and experimenting with untapped techniques of musicality. (In 1984, he made “Morons,” a confessional tale about rude, party-crashers who eat all the furniture — something of a coarse minimal-wave racket destined to go viral on tomorrow’s blogosphere.)

 

A WISE INNOCENCE

“The music was very innocent,” Eberitzsch says. “We worked from a standpoint not so much of knowledge but of an ignorance of where we were going. We really were crawling to stand, to walk, to run. It was pure.” But by forsaking formula and conventional pop structures, Eberitzsch was able to craft a unique outsider sound hinged on his restless yet determinate spirit to create new dimensions of possibility in his music.

Eberitzsch brought that explorer’s ethos to the studio, where he played around with recording techniques. With a child’s amusement, he used an old- fashioned Fender Echoplex in “Rapture,” and applied a screwdriver to his Hammond keyboard to create wobbling noises. He then manipulated the tape loop, searching loosely for “weird sounds” that would produce warped textures. Those strange, idiosyncratic effects helped to shape the psychedelic, expanding quality of the music without smothering it in abstraction.

“It’s still earthy because it was manipulated not by machines, but by the hands of the monkey man,” Eberitzsch says with a laugh when discussing such techniques. He claims inspiration for his hands-on approach to technical play came in part from the infamous introductory scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the protohuman chimpanzee throws a bone into the air and it turns, in a twist of editing magic, into a spaceship.

Eberitzsch’s creative hunger also guided his poignant lyrical ability. He wrote ebullient songs that rejoice in the sweeter tastes of life, with invigorating messages about overcoming life’s struggles. In “Life is a Tortured Love Affair,” singer Johnny Lovett laces his words with an incisive despair, yet still gathers the vigor to belt out, “You’ve got to keep improving.” The mood is matched in “Dark Angels,” where fluttering keys charge an uplifting groove contrasted by a mournful guitar riff.

Soulful compositions such as “Life is a Tortured Love Affair” and “Dark Angels” possess different shades of tension, suspending aggressive and nurturing forces in a dynamic balance of sound and energy. While reaching to empower and gathering the courage to hope, the songs returned to sober realizations about “the nonresolvable conflicts of civilization.” Yet even today, Eberitzsch exudes a wise innocence, remaining simply and impossibly idealistic. “I wrote songs that have great messages about how it could be better,” he says.

Ecstatic that the world finally wants to hear his earthy psychedelia, Eberitzsch searches for some reason behind the new twist in his fate. “There’s a need for music that was from an era with a lot of vibrancy, wonderful messages, incredible originality, and spiritual feeling,” he says. Eberitzsch is right. His music not only embodies that iconic era of the Bay Area, but also, like a prism, distorts and enriches it from a new angle. It reminds us that much of this particular history has yet to be heard — let alone written. “That’s why the tapes ended up in the garage,” he reflects. “I thought somebody, some day, is going to end up in the garage and blow the sand off this cryptic message.”

Part one of “A lost San Francisco saga” ran in the March 17, 2010 issue of the Guardian. It can be found online at www.sfbg.com/2010/03/16/lost-san-francisco-saga.

Family Groove Records is releasing the HE3 Project: Chapter One on March 30. For more information, go to www.familygrooverecords.com.

 

Past, present, future

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Past, present, future

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Am I the only one who feels an overwhelming sensation of near implosion when listening to Flying Lotus? I’m not talking about Steven Ellison’s crackling, low-end production that leans on off-kilter percussion while swerving on warm synth melodies like the late great J Dilla tipping on trucks (although that liquidic soul is mad electrifying too). Ellison also summons this other lunatic style that seeps into my android brain right when I least expect. It’s a sort of smattering mercury-noise that builds to the point of maximum intensity and then falls away suddenly, disclosing a clearing of purplish-orange haze.

All that cyberkinetic production, however, works in tandem. Ellison’s gift is not so much that he can shock and awe with singular frenetic beats, but that he can craft a holistic mood that engages, holds, and in the thick of its hypnotic momentum, casts an entrancing spell. I’d make the case that the effect is a movement of dislocation and reembodiment, parallel to the transcendental objectives behind experimental forms of both spiritual and space jazz recorded in the late 1960s and ’70s. There’s no question that Ellison channels the celestial blood of Alice Coltrane (his great-aunt and perhaps greatest muse) in his testament. And just as those avant-garde jazz legends made headway finding musical freedom within intergalactic space-ways (the infinite within), Ellison charts something of a fractured spatio-temporal exploration himself.

I’m going to take a leap (if you will allow a journalist such an experiment) and tentatively pretend that the titles for Fly Lo’s records map the spiritual blueprint shaping his music. We’ll see if we can make some progress with this approach.

Ellison’s first full-length record, 1983 (Plug Research, 2006), marks the temporal origin of the 27-year-old and a return to a certain aesthetic sphere of possibilities. Ellison graces this effort with video game bleeps and zaps, that stark retro-futuristic sound of 1980s sci-fi film and monstrous joystick machines. But the drenched robotics nourishing “Massage Situation” and the warped sonic bits that weave through arresting drum programming in “Vegas Collie” don’t mine nostalgia. Instead, Ellison recontextualizes familiar sounds in magnetic ways, breathing life into vacuous drones from the past. History is revived to reimagine the future and overlay a richness of sensual value onto the present.

In 2008, Flying Lotus made ground with Los Angeles (Warp), a pioneering effort that won the ears of hip-hop heads, pitch-forking indie rockers, and electronic bass fiends/geeks alike. The record seems to have quickly become one of those pivotal works of art that serve as a reference point for nearly everything new school in electronic music. And Los Angeles, the city itself, the last stop on the New World’s burdened journey for Manifest Destiny, has also become such a symbolic environment for today’s musical wanderers. It’s a city of tense contradictions: endless opportunity and suffocation, cosmopolitan diversity and isolating segregation, an artificial neon-lit haven placed in a sun-choked desert by the sea. It’s not so different perhaps from that Old Word paradise mucked with broken dreams — Jerusalem. Such is the spatio-origin and milieu for Flying Lotus’ second full-length, as we hop on a sizzling “Camel” and “Melt!”; disintegrate into fuzz-drenched traffic on “Orbit 405”; and open our new metallic bodies in the whirlwind swamps around a “Parisian Goldfish.”

The third record on the horizon, Cosmogramma (Warp), set for release in the U.S. on May 4, breaks away from particular spatio-temporal signifiers to reach for the universal. Ellison baptized the record as a “cosmic drama,” and the title itself suggests nothing less than a grammar of infinitum. The single “Computer Face//Pure Being” is perhaps the best example yet of the antagonistic force that fuels Flying Lotus’ adventurous work. It incites a centrifugal experience — perilous and transformative — out of malfunctioning and utterly animate computer jazz. Yes, the age of machines with soul has dawned.

FLYING LOTUS

With Kode9

Sat/27, 9 p.m., $17.50

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

The incredibly filthy truth

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
The incredibly filthy truth

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Since Xiu Xiu’s Fabulous Muscles came out six years ago, the indie press circuit has settled in to give the group a long run of 4-or-5-star, 7.5-to-10-point, and good-to-very-good ratings. It’s the 2000s’ equivalent of 1970s major label benign neglect, which allowed nominally successful artists to go weird in plain sight.

Xiu Xiu has never not been weird, but it’s a deep and personally honest weirdness that, while acknowledged, is rarely unpacked. Critically, it simply has room to exist, but listening to fans, it seems like this band could save your life. Though they are clearly pop — something band leader Jamie Stewart insists on — dusting off the surface reveals a network of underground reference points that actually have the power to shock the middle class.

If those terms — underground, middle class — seem old-fashioned, that’s because they have the potential to describe life as it’s lived, something Xiu Xiu is clearly going for. These terms might be misapplied to indie rock, but Xiu Xiu’s decadence is a moral one beneath the veneer of self-indulgence. Bright red stickers on Xiu Xiu jewel cases contain descriptions of the charitable organizations that the band contributes part of the profits to, not critical plaudits.

Though Xiu Xiu’s personnel fluctuates, Stewart works best with a female counterpoint. Romantic partner Angela Seo has stepped up as muse and collaborator on the band’s latest record, Dear God, I Hate Myself (Kill Rock Stars). Inside, reference points speak not just to Stewart’s personal obsessions — and Xiu Xiu is nothing if not an intensely personal project — but also reveal what’s really at stake in songs that can seem comically self-loathing and also authentically therapeutic.

As with previous releases, everything that happens on Dear God, I Hate Myself can be unpacked from its poppiest song. To my ears, that’s "Chocolate Makes You Happy." It has many of the elements that make up the Xiu Xiu profile: there’s an outsize chorus, a combination of sturdy electronic beats and destabilizing live percussion, and lyrics that are simultaneously moving and outrageous. Seven albums in, Stewart’s breathy voice is still pushing lyrics like "Chocolate makes you happy/As you deign to sing along/When you thrust your fingers down your throat/And wash away what’s wrong," then pivoting seconds later to deliver something like "out of your mind with whoreishness, incredibly young, incredibly filthy."

Musically, Stewart is sticking with the influences he named years ago: Henry Cowell’s dissonant tone clusters and bisexuality, the Cure’s bedroom catharsis and ill-managed longing, the guilelessness of video game music. Equally important, though, are writers like Dennis Cooper and Peter Sotos, gay writers often categorized as "transgressive" for their fiction’s (though Sotos’ writing takes the form of metareportage of pedophilic crime) interest in distinguishing between fantasy and reality. The impulse seems like a moral one; it’s how they draw that line that gets attention. Sotos is certainly the more underground of the two — press photos of an earlier lineup had Xiu Xiu’s faces partially obscured by books, including Sotos’ 2000 Index — and his way of presenting the intolerable has a few less narrative safe-words than Cooper’s.

The reason Xiu Xiu exists, as Stewart has written on the band’s blog, is to be "blunt about awful shit" — awful shit that Stewart or his loved ones have experienced. The personal register distinguishes it from Sotos’ newsprint-stained writings, but both have a narrative technique easily mistaken for no technique, a kind of narrative edge-play. What makes the band so compelling and relevant and seemingly ill-understood is that they take the plunge into being ridiculous, outrageous, and over-the-top — labeling them "confessional" is selling them seriously short. Lyrics and music put the listener close to soiled underwear and civilian corpses, atrocities that take place in the family den or in Fallujah.

Talking openly and achingly about things painfully hidden acknowledges the manipulation and artifice of pop music and, in doing so, puts more faith in its power. Xiu Xiu inspires testimonials because their music creates a place for collective grief. As a result, their music’s catharsis is a personal and political one. And though not every listener has a need for it, in doing what it does naturally, the band takes indie rock snake oil and turns it into chocolate.

XIU XIU

With tUnE-YaRdS and Noveller

Sat/20, 10 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Light into darkness

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Light into darkness

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC High Places’ upcoming release High Places vs. Mankind (Thrill Jockey) opens with the slow-tempered "The Longest Shadow." The chorus offers a supine first-person perspective of the sun’s effect on the earth at dusk. The first verse focuses on letting love in, but by the second verse Mary Pearson’s lyrics narrate the end of a relationship, which includes that universal nostalgia (a.k.a. confusion) of not really knowing why a relationship terminates, and includes the ritual stages of longing, wondering, and finally, remembering.

High Places’ music is designed to be lost in; it infiltrates and instigates meditation, but it also manages to keep the listener constantly moving. That’s how good the beat is as it weaves in and out of Pearson’s vocals. When the second track "On Giving Up" begins, it’s hard to determine if Pearson’s extending the last poem, and is talking about the actual breakup night, or if she’s talking about quitting cigarettes, booze, or some addiction, as she sings: "It’s all because I feel everything that’s gone. It’s all gone. Well, tonight is going to be the night." But that ambivalence is part of the charm, allowing the listener to relate and reflect.

Pearson and Rob Barber are High Places. The pair explored the natural world on the 2008 compilation 03/07-09/07, and on their self-titled album from the same year (both on Thrill Jockey). But on High Places vs. Mankind, there is a clear shift toward "humanity," as Pearson defines it, "for lack of a better word."

Weather — the hot, the cold — as well as spatial relationships, and differences, have a large impact on how we as humans live and operate. The band moved from New York to Los Angeles roughly a year ago. "We really had no good reason to, other than the weather," Barber says when I ask him over the phone why they decided to move. L.A. literally exists because it averages 320 sunny days a year, which made it the ideal location to film, and thus Hollywood emerged. After settling down in L.A. and taking a pause from touring, the duo suddenly had a great deal more space and time. They began writing and recording. But curiously, the warmth, space, and time led to icier sounds and darker themes in its new recording.

Pearson explains that High Places’ music made in New York "is based on escapism and trying to create our ideal environment. But because it’s so beautiful in L.A. all the time, we don’t need to talk about that stuff quite as much." This allowed the band to explore new ideas.

On High Places vs. Mankind, the blissed-out melodies and undeniable dance rhythms along with the complex layering and tidbits of dub are still apparent. But there is more: guitars sounding like guitars, unlike before, when they could’ve been mistaken for steel drums or sitars. And Pearson’s vocals are less affected, allowing them to be vividly heard.

The back of High Places’ self-titled release reads: "recorded at home by High Places." In New York, the band/best friends lived together. "I think that made us write every note together," says Pearson. In L.A., where they no longer share an apartment, they’ve taken a different approach. The pair discovered that they desired different types of workspaces. "I would work at home, and she would work in an outside studio," Barber explains. "We’d meet up and smash it all together. We’d go back and forth with it, responding to each other like call-and-response."

The change in sound is cooler at times, but it is also more direct in its message. "It was much more based on human relationships, and life and death," says Pearson. The album is dark and light at the same time — tragic contemplations are matched with stretched-out synths, as well as those bouncing beats and rhythmic hooks High Places has utilized in the past to keep things airy. The music makes you pause, get lost, question your own mortality, think about your last heartache, and when the daze is over, you feel one step closer to the infinite.

High Places’ forthcoming show will add one more twinge in its exploration of human relationships by including Pearson’s sister Laura on vocals for the first time, and she’ll continue on most of the U.S. tour. Pearson explains that she and her sister have been singing together informally all their lives — "Karaoke," interrupts Barber — and that HP has wanted to include her on tour for a long time now. *

HIGH PLACES

with Mi Ami and Protect Me

Wed/24, 8 p.m., $10/$12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell St., SF

www.rickshawstop.com

A lost San Francisco saga

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
A lost San Francisco saga

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC “There are great artists and musicians who will never be discovered,” says Herman Eberitzsch Jr. III “That’s the way it is,” he reasons. “There’s only so much room at the top.”

That’s why you’ve most likely never heard of Eberitzsch (pronounced “eh-bur-itch”) despite his remarkable music talent. He has a name straight out of a gothic fairy tale — far from the iconic, slick-sounding syllables associated with San Francisco’s psychedelic soul renaissance during the late 1960s and ’70s. Yet his recordings hold up to the best of them. “We had a strong conviction that we were the next big thing,” Eberitzsch says. “But we weren’t.”

Each generation harbors a certain aesthetic mood that mutates and evolves under the prescient vision of a limited number of innovators. Their fresh styles, resonant at first, then become formulated and stagnant, disseminated in the norm. We then await the next genius, or at least a movement of collective creativity, to shake things up. But what attunes us to one artistic strand, pregnant with a world of open-ended meaning and feeling, rather than another with just as much potential richness? How do we come to discern between the vanguard and the wayward? And what if we miss something in the process?

Eberitzsch’s unlikely story might just read like a rediscovery of what we overlooked. He recorded hours of bluesy soul fueled by free-form jazz throughout the ’70s that never saw commercial release. He arranged, wrote, sang, and funkified the keys on dozens of songs with mainstays of Santana’s circuit (Coke Escovedo, Linda Tillery), Lee Oskar of War, and Sly Stone’s drummer, Greg Errico, among many others. Most of the musicians who recorded on Eberitzsch’s own arrangements were, by and large, no-namers, yet it’s their music which now stands out.

Eberitzsch’s songs leap and wander. They gracefully move the spirit while grounding the body in rich, earthy grooves. They are a naive and inspiringly audacious attempt at channeling the sort of raw expression that challenges, mesmerizes, fights, and loves. In the midst of so much experimental and groundbreaking sound, Eberitzsch’s music either missed the ears of the right A&R rep or was just not the right kind of different.

 

A CHANCE REDISCOVERY

Now Eberitzsch is sitting across from me in a café near his former Potrero district home, excited to tell his story. He greets me as Allen Ginsberg (my look-alike visage intact, masked in dark beard and glasses), and I feign appreciation for the well-meaning reference, knowing that although Ginsberg had quite a poetic sharpness, he wasn’t the best-looking fellow. But Eberitzsch’s generous charm and earnest happiness with the course his life has taken, despite the disappointments, quickly win me over. Waves of amiable energy overtake the slightly weathered rasp in his voice. A youthful, idealistic Eberitzsch naturally emerges in the course of minutes. In a way, he’s been waiting for this interview for 40 years.

“Atlantic told me, ‘We don’t hear it at this time,'<0x2009>” Eberitzsch says, highlighting the elusive way a record company executive might elongate time, stretching the curt word like a worn rubber band. “But when you invest your life and your heart and soul into a project of your own creation, your own little children of songs, you don’t throw them away. You don’t send them down the River Styx,” he says, laughing. “So I put ’em in the basement.”

That’s where record collector Daniel Borine mistakenly found the two-inch apex tapes, 35 years later, while doing photo research for a reissue project on lost Bay Area modern soul. What those tapes hid — a dusty time capsule of relentless insight and vigor — amazed Borine. In a move away from the prideful hoarding that typically characterizes collectors, Borine wanted to share the tapes with a larger audience and finally do justice to Eberitzsch’s music. He pursued the new and quickly growing business of recorded music archaeology and preservation, an endeavor that mirrors what so many archivists have done already for literature, film, and visual art. Borine had the tapes mastered and organized the tracks into coherent volumes. He plans to put out four full-length records of Eberitzsch’s brilliant efforts, titled the HE3 Project, over the coming years on his own upstart Family Groove Records.

The first chapter of the compilation is set for release on March 30. It focuses on Eberitzsch’s trailblazing efforts from three distinct recording sessions between 1971 and 1974. These recordings capture Eberitzsch’s far-reaching artistry — a grounded and soulful angle on space-jazz psychedelia, informed as much by Weather Report as by Robert Johnson. This is the story of the man behind the HE3 Project.

 

ORIGINS OF A WOULD-BE TRAILBLAZER

Herman Eberitzsch Jr. III was born in San Francisco’s colorful Portola neighborhood in 1947. He grew up in a German household, where he learned to play the classical composers — Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms — at a young age. But somewhere along the way Eberitzsch caught the funk and couldn’t let go. “In my room I listened to James Brown,” he recalls. “When I grooved and played the boogie, I had a powerful left foot that shook the ground. My left foot took down the house, so I eventually had to move out.”

Eberitzsch conjured doo-wop on the corner with the young funky drummer Greg Errico, who lived down the street. He was enraptured by the blues in Oakland, danced to jazzy R&B grooves in San Francisco, and witnessed the emergence of a new psychedelic sound at the Fillmore and in the streets. Immersed in the Bay Area’s magnetic music community, he naturally gravitated to the keys again. “I figured out how to play funky style clavinet and piano,” Eberitzsch says. “They called me Funky Knuckles for short.”

At 21, the freshly-dubbed Funky Knuckles joined a band with Boots Hughston called Sword and the Stone, and was booked by Bill Graham to perform at the Fillmore. The outfit transitioned into a quartet, Shane, with Santana’s David Brown on bass. They hustled around the city making $10 an hour and all the beer they could drink. The city bubbled over with an unparalleled creative force. The time was electric.

That same year — 1968 — Eberitzsch attended UC Berkeley to study psychiatry. But he quit after one semester to pursue music as a career, preferring the organic therapeutic powers of rhythm and melody to the structured treatment of question and answer. “Music is a much more pure form of psychiatry. It has two potentials: it either incites you to create, or it soothes the savage beast,” he says. “I became a knowledgeable person of people through music.” And cyclically, Eberitzsch’s improvisational music erupted from kinetic relationships with people.

Read part two of “A lost San Francisco saga” here.

Music mitzvah

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Music mitzvah

MUSIC I am a Judaism junkie. I love Fiddler on the Roof. I read Heeb magazine online. And I collect Jewish puns the way Midwest moms used to collect Beanie Babies. But until recently, I knew shockingly little about Jewish music. Turns out the term doesn’t just refer to music made by Jews (sorry, Beastie Boys), nor is it limited to songs sung in synagogue. Even the broad genre of klezmer music is just one facet of an ancient and dynamic musical tradition that mixes the theme of Jewish experience with Jewish languages like Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and Judeo-Arabic dialects, all translated through crosscultural musical tropes. And just as the Jewish experience continues to grow and change, so does the music associated with it.

It is this ongoing genre-bending cultural conversation that the 25th edition of Berkeley’s Jewish Music Festival, hosted by the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay, will honor. “This year, we’re focusing on that dialogue between the sacred and the secular,” said director Eleanor Shapiro. “The idea was music that’s revelation as well as revelry.”

The program starts with sacred Jewish and Muslim music from the Middle East, performed by the award-winning Yuval Ron Ensemble (whose founder and namesake, incidentally, won an Oscar for the score of the comedy short West Bank Story). Next up is a free concert for Jewish sacred music that can be sung during the Sabbath and on Passover (which starts several days later).

The lineup takes a contemporary turn with the American premiere of Diaspora Redux, a jazzy, avant-garde project created by top musicians from New York, Berlin, and Buenos Aires, and featuring members of Klezmer Buenos Aires, who were a hit at the 2007 festival and will perform as a duet during a special Monday matinee. Sunday sees the West Coast premiere of Saints and Tzadik, a collaboration between Grammy-winning Celtic singer Susan McKeown and Klezmatics alum Lorin Sklamberg.

As if that isn’t enough, four of the festival’s musicians will host a four-hour master class for seasoned musicians. And, for the first time, the festival will return for one day in July for a free, outdoor concert featuring local Jewish music talent and a new work from award-winning composer Dan Plonsey exploring the theme of becoming an adult.

Shapiro says the intention of the festival has always been twofold: entertainment and education. With that in mind, JCC East Bay will host a pre-festival roundtable of expert scholars to discuss the Jewish musical revival on March 14, a discussion that won’t be necessary to enjoy the coming concerts but will “help frame the music with a historic background.” Shapiro is particularly proud to present a full festival of music that wouldn’t be heard many other places, given that Jewish music is often buried within the broad genre of roots or world music.

But with such an eclectic lineup, it might be hard for Jewish music novices like me to know where to start or what to prioritize. Shapiro’s advice? “If you’re spiritually-oriented, come to Yuval Ron. If jazz-oriented, come to Diaspora Redux. If you like folk, come to Saints and Tzadiks. If you play the accordion or piano, don’t miss Klezmer Buenos Aires. And if you have kids, try the matinee on Monday.”

Me? I’ll do my best to go to all of ’em, especially the event in July, which will feature an instrument petting zoo. I’m also going to bring all my gentile sisters and goy boys along. After all, Shapiro says of Jewish music, “you don’t have to be Jewish to either do it or like it.”

JEWISH MUSIC FESTIVAL

March 14–29 and July 11

Multiple locations, including

Jewish Community Center of the East Bay

1414 Walnut, Berk.

(510) 848-0237

www.jewishmusicfestival.org

 

To hurl or not to hurl

-
0
To hurl or not to hurl

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Keep your panties on and your polka dot bras in the drawer — they may be flattered, but Tegan and Sara have enough lingerie to last a lifetime. The Canadian twins are on the road for a tour of their latest release, Sainthood (Sire/WEA, 2009) and were proud to receive not one, but two, animal print brassieres on an Austin stage last week.

"I don’t even know what to say about ladies wearing leopard print bras — but I can say I would never have to buy another bra again," says Sara Quin, recalling the outrageous number of undergarments that she and her sister receive on a regular basis. Long-haired rocker dudes and R&B artists with six-packs seem the obvious targets for women’s personal attire, but cute little lesbians from Alberta?

"There are always bras and underwear backstage at venues, and I always wonder, who gets these?" Sara says. "Then I remember— we do."

Their stylish haircuts alone have switched ladies to the other side, not to mention their adorable turned-up noses, intelligence, feminist opinions, and six albums of pure pop genius. It’s been 12 years of music-making for the siblings, and they’re still surprised by the forward, and forceful, signs of affection some fans offer.

"I’m used to boys screaming ‘Take your shirt off!’ That’s common and annoying. But when a girl does it, I have to ask, ‘What are you thinking?’<0x2009>" The catcalls and Mardi Gras-style requests have always been hard for Sara to swallow. "My God, I’m not a stripper."

Baffled, she tries to deconstruct why women feel the urge to yell such absurdities. "Maybe they’re just excited to participate in a social custom?" she hypothesizes. A shy girl herself, she gives props to those ladies who have confidence. "Sometimes we have to suspend our logical, cultured brains and just enjoy the fact that people objectify you — take it as a sign of affection and roll with it."

Tit-show requests aside, Sara says she and Tegan couldn’t be happier with their dedicated fan base. Audiences sing along, pay attention, and eat up the witty banter the ladies are known to dish out between songs.

"We don’t feel like we’re a buzz band anymore and it’s not such a question about whether or not people will leave the show as a fan," she says, taking a break from set-up at a venue in Dallas. "Our audience has grown, and I’ve really been feeling an energy of oneness."

So if fans are shunned for catapulting linens, what would the ladies like to see land at their feet? Letters are nice, but Sara can’t fathom why people crumple and chuck them onto stage. "Call me romantic — or meticulous — I’d probably arrange for a carrier pigeon to send someone a note. But I’m a musician and I put a lot of thought into the packaging and delivery of how people receive things."

In recent years, books became a popular, yet potentially dangerous gift idea. "I love books, but people’s aim is far too accurate," Sara laughs, noting her near escapes from death. "I totally appreciate any gift. But if you’re going to throw a book, pad it with a towel."

TEGAN AND SARA

Fri/5, 8 p.m., $35

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

1 (800) 745-3000

www.ticketmaster.com

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